P3D Re: Museum

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

>Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 00:34:25 -0700
>From: "Dr. George A. Themelis" <DrT-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: P3D Dan's 2 cents on the museum thing...

>Dan writes about the NSA library and the valuable service it performs:

>>That library is well on it's way to being a
>>serious museum in and of itself. I hope to personally help it grow
>>extensively in the future. We could all donate a bit here and there (and
>>get write off's if that matters to you) and help to build up one of the
>>world's largest, and potentially most valuable 3D collections.

>I only have one question:  How far can it grow before it becomes
>unmanageable?  

>Just one example:  Harold Lloyd took over 300,000 stereo slides (!!!)
>in his lifetime.  That could fill a small room and require one full
>year just to view them.  (View, not catalog - I assume a person can 
>view 1000 slides a day, that's a lot of slides!)  Who has the time to 
>do this?  If they are all donated to the NSA library and I am visiting 
>and want to see some of Harold Lloyd's slides, where do I start from?

If it hasn't already been done, perhaps it would be useful for 3D photography
to advance to the 19th century :-), by development of some analog to the
Dewey Decimal System. When I go to the library, I don't have to search through
every book in the place to find a particular topic. With keywords, and
multi-dimensional computer indexing, finding a slide you want should be
hundreds or thousands of times faster than an exhaustive search.

Once you have the field narrowed down to several hundred or several thousand
images, you could use a computer to display a succession of medium- to low-
resolution scans, at whatever rate you like (perhaps a second or two per image,
or perhaps multiple images on the screen at the same time). You signal or tag
the ones you want to view, either as high resolution scans, or as the
original slides.

As to the question of who would do the cataloging and indexing, that's one
of the things librarians do in a book library. [Come to think of it, don't
any of the existing collections have a stereophotolibrarian?] Indexing of a 
large collection would take years, and would be an ongoing process as new
material comes in. With modern computer technology, it would be nice to
allow for users to submit additional documentation to the scans they view
(especially since an individual librarian is bound to miss some items in
the initial indexing). For example, if the initial indexing of an image
indicated "Tom Cruise leaping from an exploding helicopter onto the TGV
moving at full speed in a tunnel", an alert user might submit the comments
"movie 'Mission Impossible', special effects, stunt double". The submissions
could be reviewed on a routine basis, and added to the indexing if appropriate.

If the various collections could agree on a standardized method of indexing and
handling of image scans, it would be possible to search beyond a single
collection from one site. You could at least view scans of images from other
collections, and if you would rather view the original slide, at least you
can locate it in Vienna, and arrange your vacation plans accordingly.

As to how far it can grow before it becomes unmanageable, I don't know,
but I suspect the current system for books handles more items than there
are stereo photographs (at least photographs that have been viewed publicly).

John R


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